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My First Impressions of Web3

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Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#951

Post by ineptech »

discardedrefuse wrote: post #559
ineptech wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is the sort of thing I'm talking about, but I think it also demonstrates that there's a ways to go yet. I suspect that one part of the solution will be abandoning linux and windows. They were built for performance and versatility, which just aren't that important in a server I use to host my blog and email, and come with a lot of baggage that isn't needed in a virtual-only OS.

Don't want to bother with OS updates? CoreOS exists. And containers abstract away the fiddly parts of running services. Firecracker/Ignite exists. I feel like all the parts are there to build what you want. Except there's no market for it. Even if it were free and easy to run your own Nextcloud instance, most users would never switch away from Google/Apple/Microsoft. Techie users can roll their own servers. Power use…

I don't think that's true, people bitch about those services all the time. Everyone that uses FB has a gripe about it. Windows users have been complaining about Windows non-stop for thirty years.

I'm not arguing that people will switch off of those to crappy self-hosted replacements out of sheer spite against megacorps, I'm arguing that they will switch when self-hosted replacements are better and easier to use. Building a self-hosted platform that does what Facebook does more easily and conveniently than Facebook is hard, but IMHO it's easier than building AWS or Salesforce, and it gets easier every year, due to bandwidth and cloud hardware getting cheaper and big tech getting more user-hostile.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#952

Post by Thorrez »

diab0lic wrote: post #906
Thorrez wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not fully trusting them. They can't change the content.

They can change the content, you’ll just know they did it. Much like if my watch gets stolen I’ll know, but I still don’t have a watch anymore.

They can delete the content. That's the only "change" they can do. It's like your watch analogy, except you can easily back up an image, but cannot back up a watch.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#953

Post by bcherny »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #723
bcherny wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Couldn't Rolex issue a PGP signed CSV of all valid Rolex serial numbers once a month on IPFS and you'd get the exact same security and trust profile without having to involve any "web3" feature? They totally could. But what’s interesting about NFTs is they standardize this process across all kinds of assets and issuers. Instead of a CSV for Rolex, a Twitter history for an artist, a deed for a house, a rental agreem…

It would be easy to create standards for Digital Asset and Identity so that producers could represent ownership on their servers and allow for trade. The only thing NFTs give you is hosting for this in a logically centralized network. Hypothetically, this allows for operations on different contracts to be composible, but I don't think this happens much in practice.

It’s two sides of the same thing, I think.

Some things are standardized with protocols: IP, TCP, SQL, etc.

Other things are standardized with storage formats: FAT, NTFS, etc.

NFTs fall into the latter bucket, with some conventions for the former but nothing as mature as a protocol.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#954

Post by Karrot_Kream »

p1esk wrote: post #934
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy the early part either, but "3 years into the internet we had emails and tcp" is the wrong way to critique it IMO. The "Internet" meaning IP was already the 3rd or 4th (or more) attempt at trying to create a computer networking standard. Predecessors to the internet include: ARPANET, Usenet, FidoNet, BBSes, and CYCLADES, if not more. By the way, Email existed on _all_ of these platforms before TCP or even…

"3 years into the internet we already had emails and TCP", but the seeds for these things had been in the works for a decade plus I'm not sure what you mean. Nothing has been in the works for a decade plus in 1971 when the first email was sent - it just two years after the very first internet connection was made. In contrast, it's been 13 years since bitcoins appeared, and aside from a potentially easier way to pay f…

In your other post to my comment you mentioned that "the internet" was referring to ARPANET so I'll use that version of your argument. Electronic mail [1] was already being used on private networks to mainframes 1962. Before that, data messages were being sent over Teletext, so these private networks were just trying to do away with requiring a Teletext printer. Before Teletext, you had telegraphs being sent.

ARPANET was built with the idea to allow remote access to expensive computing resources, mainframes, at universities and government research institutions. This is far from the idea that "the computers of the world should be connected", which is roughly the idea behind the internet. Electronic mail was reimplemented in parallel on multiple different networks. But for a long time, the internet was indeed a solution looking for a problem. Why do Joe and Anu's computers have to be connected together, who cares when they can call each other on the phone or meet in person? I mean, can Joe or Anu even afford a private computer?? Private networks for research or commercial purposes were already in regular use.

> I don't see any useful applications of crypto technology.

I think in your anti-crypto zeal, you're assuming a position I don't have. I don't actually think it's valid to say "cryptocurrency is early". The early computer networks were created at a time when huge monopolies, state-run or corporatist, owned most telecoms networks around the world. It was bound to take time when entrenched interests had interest in maintaining the status quo. I also think that comparing blockchains to the Internet is silly; the Internet is the Internet, blockchains are blockchains. My point here is simply that "we had emails and TCP in 3 years" is plain factually incorrect. The internet as we know it now (a system of networks connected via L2 links that are then bridged using IP/L3 on an IP virtual address space) actually took a long time to be developed. If you're looking for an analogy to show that 13 years is too long for usable innovation, then the Web would be a better one, as the Web legitimately was used within a mere couple years of its inception. I still think making analogy between the Web and blockchains is silly for the same reason I think making the analogy between the Internet and blockchains is silly.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#955

Post by Ericson2314 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #907
Ericson2314 wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of a a few "chains" though means an ephemeral node might actually not suck though. Put another way, even IPFS nodes that for all intents and purposes are "clients" can still speak the same protocal to talk to the pinning service. The single-ish central chain idea was always terrible. "Trustless" or not, that much synchronization is a misfeature! The real world really is partial-order time/causality, that is…

I make content. I put it on IPFS. I pin it to Piñata because my laptop isn’t on all the time. Piñata decides my content isn’t acceptable and removes it. You can’t access my content. Not a problem?

With torrents people actually participate. Piñata should not be viewed as the "database of record", but as a something that complements the desktop at home.

I understand that is still not satisfactory.

I think the real goal is to find institutional users who are not interested in a profit. For example I am involved with https://nlnet.nl/project/SoftwareHeritage-P2P/. Software Heritage would be not a high bandwidth pinner, but a pinner of last resort. Universities were very important to the original internet, and should also host public data sets, software artifact, and hopefully if Sci Hub prevails the journal articles themselves.

None of that is a pinning service, but if it catches on the big cloud companies might feel compelled to get into the pinning service game, if only so they can get those university and government contracts! The current cloud computing business as a racket, but them offering support for a protocol that reduces switching costs might make for some real competition.

Basically "web2" problems are Captialism problems, and the stuff needs to become a low-margin business or state-run not-for profit to be better. There is no secret magic short cut, it is a political problem. SV is of course completely uninterested in low-margin businesses. The regular web3 will have a hard time being anything but a Ponzi scheme per its design, but IPFS itself at least doesn't have those characteristics baked in, and so these alternative futures are possible.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#956

Post by kkjjkgjjgg »

pixel_tracing wrote: post #915
kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"All the while, nothing ever actually seems to get fixed." Meanwhile, Bitcoin just works, and it is fairly easy to understand. Every once in a while I try to get excited about Ethereum. They really do seem to think about a lot of interesting things and try to address them. But at the end of the day, it all just seems way too complex. As for NFTs, I think they could just be colored coins on the Bitcoin Blockchain, whi…

I’m sorry but to clarify a few points here, Bitcoin “works” technically, and it works as a speculation and black market vehicle. It has not replaced the US dollar. I don’t see people having a need to use it when shopping groceries, paying for concert tickets, etc even when the option to do so is there. This is precisely the authors point.

The comment I was replying to was about technical problems, like high gas fees.

You can use fiat for speculation and black markets.

It would be weird to define "crypto works" as "people have to use it for shopping". It would be nice to be able to use it with more shops, but that is another matter. I know people who keep their savings in crypto and pay with credit cards that are backed by crypto.

Whether you "need" for example becomes an ideological question. If you agree with governments monetary politics, I guess you don't need it.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#958

Post by p1esk »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #954
p1esk wrote: post #934

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"3 years into the internet we already had emails and TCP", but the seeds for these things had been in the works for a decade plus I'm not sure what you mean. Nothing has been in the works for a decade plus in 1971 when the first email was sent - it just two years after the very first internet connection was made. In contrast, it's been 13 years since bitcoins appeared, and aside from a potentially easier way to pay f…

In your other post to my comment you mentioned that "the internet" was referring to ARPANET so I'll use that version of your argument. Electronic mail [1] was already being used on private networks to mainframes 1962. Before that, data messages were being sent over Teletext, so these private networks were just trying to do away with requiring a Teletext printer. Before Teletext, you had telegraphs being sent. ARPANET…

OK, you have a point, I agree that comparing blockchains to internet is not very useful. And I'm not actually anti-crypto, simply because I don't know enough about it or its potential. What do you think, where is this technology going? Clearly a lot of smart people are trying to build something. What are they building?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#959

Post by mmcnl »

this_user wrote: post #520
devadvance wrote: post #17

This is a really well-thought-out, nuanced take. I really appreciate mixture of "but there are still servers", not being able to stop a gold rush, and (refreshingly) the technical take on the implementation details. It stands in such stark contrast to other content. For example, a web3 chat app announcement I saw yesterday [1]. I even joined the Discord to learn more and just found...hype. I found this parenthetical…

The fundamental problem with decentralisation is that it will always be less efficient than a centralised solution due to the overhead necessary for coordinating the system. This means increased costs of some nature. In order to justify those costs, the decentralised system has to add a sufficient amount of value compared to the centralised solution. And not only is that usually not the case, but, as Moxie points out…

The fundamental problem is that problems with centralized platforms are attributed to centralization, and thus decentralization is seen as the answer. This is entirely false. Centralization and decentralization are just words that have an objective definition. Neither is inherently better than the other and choosing either as a solution to your problem is entirely context dependent. Anyone that has a stake in crypto / web 3 conveniently leaves this crucial piece of information. E.g. it's a different solution to the same problem, not a _better_ solution the same problem. Having options by itself can be a valuable use case, but I'm afraid the gold rush is not driven by the excitement for having options, but rather for the excitement of becoming rich quick.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#960

Post by astrange »

bsagdiyev wrote: post #706
astrange wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're also noisy and you don't have a personal security team.

False to both. My home server is quiet and my OS keeps updated automatically.

I put my NAS in a quiet PC case (it’s still too loud because I don’t have any closets to keep it in) and when I filed a FreeNAS bug a graybeard literally yelled at me for not using a 1U server.
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